Chatbots in 2018, the backlash, the move to 2.0 and business reality
Tech in 2018 is pushing new boundaries, and this is supposedly the year that chatbots rise high and become smarter. Let’s take a look at how that’s going so far.
The chatbot backlash
No technology can survive for long without getting trash-talked, look at the grief Apple, Facebook or Google get when making the slightest product change. Still, they’re in a better place than Bitcoin which is a political, legal and tech football being punted around the world with its value soaring and diving accordingly.
Chatbots are not immune to criticism, and the backlash and questions are starting. Is the technology nimble and resolute enough to overcome these issues?
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Digit founder Ethan Bloch in a piece on Inc.com likens the chatbot interface to the DOS command prompt from early PCs. His company’s problem came when they removed a key piece of information from the user’s app and buried it in the chatbot.
The key lesson here is obviously to make the chatbot a facilitator, don’t let it become the star of the show, or allow it to obscure information that should be clearly visible, which thankfully few businesses have tried to do.
Over in a Digiday feature, we see fashion brands are continuing to expand their use of chatbots and augmented reality despite experiencing growing pains with these must-have technologies. Engagement is high but conversions are lower, although developers continue to fine tune the products, meaning results can turnaround very quickly.
According to the report “The brand reported a 400% increase in product engagement from users who engaged with the bot, with 50% of them sharing their experience and prompting others to try it on social media. But actual conversions are likely much lower. Only 21% of users clicked through to consider a purchase.”
The benefit of any chatbot technology is that conversation paths can be updated almost on-the-fly to build a better conversation, adding flexibility and scalability. And with AI implementations on the rise, chats will get better.
The rise of AI will push chatbots 2.0 to do better
As if on cue, a host of articles have popped up this week focusing on how AI will help drive chatbots and improve the service they provide.
Wired’s latest piece, “The Emotional Chatbots Are Here To Probe Our Feelings” comes at a time when news and awareness of mental health issues is growing. Since we spend more time on our devices than communicating with real people, can they help diagnose our problems or tune the conversation to make us feel better?
The articles offers some hope. “While caring, emotional bots might seem like an idea pulled from science fiction, Kuyda isn’t the only one who hopes it becomes the norm. Artificial intelligence is seeping into everything we own — from our phones and computers to our cars and home appliances. Kuyda and developers like her are asking, what if that AI came not just with the ability to answer questions and complete tasks, but to recognize human emotion? What if our voice assistants and chatbots could adjust their tone based on emotional cues? If we can teach machines to think, can we also teach them to feel?”
Meanwhile a new Verge piece, “Facebook is trying to teach chatbots how to chit-chat” looks at the move to make bots more personable. The problem is “they don’t display a “consistent personality,” sticking to the same set of facts about themselves throughout a conversation; second, they don’t remember what they or their conversational partners have said in the past; and third, they tend to fall back on diversionary or preprogrammed responses, like “I don’t know.”
There’s a lot of training via humans to get this working, but Persona-Chat could be the start of something beautiful when it comes to digital conversations. On a related note, over in India, chatbot therapists are already in use, something I’m sure will prove popular in the west.
Whatever the need, chatbots vendors continue to evolve their products to adopt the latest trends to make the end results more friendly and useful. Free-to-use chatbot service SnatchBot recently added natural language processing to the service, helping the bot to spot trigger words that can move the conversation along to an appropriate place, making it one of the most flexible and best chatbot platforms for any business.
The business reality for chatbots
On the ground, more companies continue to roll out chatbots for an ever-expanding number of use cases. U.S. Government agencies, after their brief shutdown, are looking to deploy chatbots to reduce staff workloads.
In South Africa, SAM is a new travel chatbot that blends artificial intelligence with the expertise of consultants to deliver personalised, relevant information to business travellers’ mobile devices.
These rollouts highlight the pressing need for businesses to maximise their human resources by getting chatbots to do more of the work or to be more valuable to the customer. This need outstrips all the trends, hype and negativity over any technology. If it works, and in these cases chatbots are now a proven entity, businesses will adopt and the market will continue to grow.
